Amy Kurtz - Kicking Sick: Your Go-To Guide for Thriving with Chronic Health Conditions

For Nina, who showed me that we are so much more than our physical bodies and who taught me that no matter where we are in our health journey, there is always something that we can do to improve our quality of life, take care of ourselves better, find light in the dark, and find beauty in the present.

For the one in every two Americans suffering from Chronic Disease, this book is for you.

Contents

Foreword

The disheartening statistic that more than half of Americans are dealing with one or more chronic medical issues personally hit home for me several years ago. I was working between eighty and one hundred hours a week in a busy medical practice, maintaining the exercise routine of a near-professional athlete, and meeting my commitments and obligations as a single father to my two children. In order to fuel this lifestyle, I didnt choose nutritious veggies and wholesome grains or plenty of sleep. Instead, I relied on loads of coffee and sugar to keep me awake and moving.

Not surprisingly, I couldnt sustain this lifestyle. My body broke down, and I developed a severe case of chronic fatigue syndrome. It was a huge wake-up call.

I had to find a way to put myself back together again, and as I tried to do that, I had to confront the fact that the profession Id dedicated my life to conventional medicine couldnt provide all the answers. The body is complex integrated ecosystem, and we have to care for, heal, and nurture the whole system by removing the things that create imbalance and provide the ingredients that create balance. Desperately ill, I went from Harvard to Columbia, saw the best doctors, but none had answers. Then I discovered a new way of thinking about chronic disease based on getting to the root causes and not just focusing on symptoms. The world of Functional Medicine provided a roadmap to health for me and my patients. In fact it is not the science of disease, but the science of creating health. In Functional Medicine we understand that food is medicine, not just calories; it is information that affects every function of your body in real time. Once I understood the power of food to reshape my biology, it was easy to fix my cookies, coffee, and sugar diet. I was eating the wrong foods, and even though I was in great shape, I learned you cant eat poorly and fix it through exercise. I needed Functional Medicine to sort out what could heal me, and it is what connected the dots in Amy Kurtzs healing as well.

Amys story is very similar to my own. Amy came to me five years ago with thyroid complications, celiac disease, a parasite infection, and a myriad of other health issues that were all affecting each other. She is a perfect example of many of my patients who have tried many traditional ways of healing and havent yet gotten the care they need. It can be difficult to take a complicated health situation and find the care you need when you have many different doctors giving you different answers that contradict each other. Functional Medicine offers a different paradigm for looking at medicine and achieving health. Given how many issues Amy had from an early age, how many complications evolved, and how many doctors she had saying different things, it would have been easy to feel hopeless. It took a lot of time, energy, and focus for her to take on her health, create a team of people, and create the experience of her illness as a valuable process. I am proud of the amount of deep work she has done in order to heal herself.

Amy took difficulty and pioneered through it. In Kicking Sick she shows that there is a better way to heal your life, where you love yourself and you grow from an experience. She has made an amazing case and resource of bringing people together in order to heal others. She used her experience with illness for good. When people go through something hard, many times people make it all about themselves and how hard it is for them. What Amy does so beautifully in Kicking Sick is that she pulled all of the cobwebs together and created a beautiful resource for people facing the same challenges that she did. She makes it easy for you to look at it in a new way, one with possibility and hope.

As a doctor and someone who has personally healed through Functional Medicine, the only way I can look at disease is to see the whole body as one integrated system, not a collection of different organs that we separate into medical specialties. I look at the whole person to find the right treatments that address root causes and restore balance in the complex web of our biology that gets people from sick to well. Amy offers the information and the encouragement you need to look at the big picture and see the connections between how you live and how you feel. If you feel youve been sidelined by your illness, this process will help you face how to get into your life with an attitude that makes you choose the endeavor of you. With kindness, humor, and wise advice, you will be ready to take each next best step on your road back to true, vibrant health. Kicking Sick is a great place to start your healing!

Wishing you health and happiness,
Mark Hyman, MD